Holly-Gale Millette, co-editor of The New Urban Gothic, contemplates the end of the world as we know it, exploring anxiety and despair in the age of the Anthropocene.

It’s the end of the world as we know it. Grief, panic, despair now runs through us like a stick of seaside rock. In the millennium, we reach backward a hundred years to when death stalked the Globe in an indiscriminate pandemic that superseded the grief and horror of the Great War. In the darkest of days of 1918 – 1919, the H1N1 avian virus condemned one third of the globe to death. By 1920, another 40 million people would perish as a direct result of one of the deadliest conflicts in human history – World War I. It was the darkest of times; it is the darkest of times. The true Gothicism of our contemporary situation is that the more things change the more things stay the same.

It’s the end of the world as we know it. We knew it, but did not intend to be critical Cassandras or to envelop our discussion on the Gothic in the cataclysm of Covid. The introduction to our book The New Urban Gothic (written months before the outbreak), teases with: “rapidly mutating and drug-resistant viruses that will almost certainly kill us all before the earth falls apart.” So, we knew, but as we say, we did not set out to create a “volume dedicated to World’s End expectations, although it is true that World’s End narratives and critique do abound.” Instead, the book’s intention was to throw light on the “tension that exists between dark experiences and darker future expectations.” Both of these are read as sublime. Indeed, the end of the world as we know it is sublime as it both frightens and lures us. Critics have argued that such environments have created a ‘return of the repressed’ (which, in itself is a Gothic monstrosity) and storytellers and writers of today are working from that perspective, incorporating theories from Darwin to Derrida, to: reconceive of ghosts; to mourn the traumatic destruction of a planet by the human stewards meant to protect it; and to invite the sublime terror of contagions of disaster into our imagination, from that perspective. But we no longer need to imagine such an Armageddon in the story-worlds of others—for it is upon us in real life.

It’s the End of the World as we Know It, is an R.E.M. song (1987) and my song of choice for an apocalypse. It reels off past ordeals and controversies that would mark the end of a known world (interior, cultural, or otherwise) but that, on existential reflection, did not really change much. Some, wrongly, mistake it for following Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire (1989) in form, but the opposite is true. Although it is subtitled with the ‘And I feel fine’ of the last line of its refrain, the repeated refrain (repeated six times, consecutively) includes the incentive found in apocalypse: “(time I had some time alone)”. This now seems darkly appropriate in Covid-times. R.E.M. focuses on the progressive darkness of a hyper-neoliberal world, and facing its inevitable Armageddon alone.

Such a world, China Miéville concludes, is the focus of the millennial Gothic mode that grips us with an anxiety that is the doomed reality for humans dominated, shaped and devoured by the built structures of late capitalism (Luckhurst, 2011). In the millennium, and especially since the global crisis of 2008, we are all now able to perceive such a world, such world-systems, and the death of humanity that proceeds from it, in ways otherwise unavailable. This ‘voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency’ (Agamben, 2005: 2) is the hegemony of neoliberalism’s competitive individualism. Millennial New Urban Gothic tales centre on these anxieties, yet reach further in scope—to consider our ruin. This book explores the dystopic and grotesque imaginings of our post-millennial life, to insist that our evolution towards cataclysmic extinction is the pressing narrative. The end of the world as we know it is the new critical and aesthetic reinterpretation of the Gothic trope in the urban space, in the global space, and in the age of the Anthropocene.

Holly-Gale Millette is an Academic, Senior Personal Academic Tutor, and a Senior Teaching Fellow for the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK. Her research and writing is as a Transatlantic Cultural and Social Historian and recent work has focused on spatial, political and psychosocial representations of the new Urban Gothic in theory and texts. She has published numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles nationally and internationally. She is co-editor, along with Ruth Heholt, of The New Urban Gothic.

References:

Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Luckhurst, R (2011) ‘In the Zone: Topologies of Genre Weirdness’ in Sara Wasson and Emily Alder (Eds.) Gothic Science Fiction, 1980 – 2010, Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, pp. 21–35. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties (Accessed, 24 September 2020). 

Photo by Marcus Duran